With regard to the answers given, I would like to offer a short story of what "addressing the core problems of a business that is struggling with its reputation and a lack of trust" can look like. Not because it is a direct analogue to SE's current situation, but because it highlights the things that matter to customers and one way in which a new CEO with limited experience in the "immediate domain" of a company was able to produce a marked turnaround in both the company's relationship to its customers, and the staff's belief in (and ability to fulfill) the "mission statement".
I apologize for not being able to point to an external reference on this; if anyone is aware of one, I would greatly appreciate a pointer. However, I was personally present as an employee for the relevant part of the company's history, and anything written in the first person is from my own recollections (meaning that it may be biased, "fuzzily" remembered, or otherwise suffer some inaccuracies but is a personal attestation).
The setting is Qwest, Inc. shortly after the SEC scandal and all of the related chaos. Hiring is largely frozen, many employees have little faith in the company, and customers have almost none. I don't recall if they were the second-worst or flat-out worst of the telephone carriers in customer satisfaction, but it was… bad. You could feel it pervading the entire company; it is hard to respect yourself or take your work seriously when the company as a whole is literally a household name for bad customer service.
In comes the new CEO, and we hear the basic drill that everyone mostly tunes out, about turning the company around, lots of work to do, etc, etc. Sure, great, I'll believe it when I see it.
And then something interesting happens: at the first "real" all-hands meeting (as in, the first one after the CEO had had enough time to actually do anything or transition in), he gets up on stage and starts to tell a story. And it isn't a story about how he turned some other company around, or how great all of the employees are, or how we need to tough it out.
No, he tells a story about how in his first week, he arranged to spend a day "in the trenches" — the first half of it undergoing the call center new-hire training (well, an abbreviated form of it, enough to familiarize himself with the tools and basic requirements) and the second half taking calls, unfiltered, directly from the queue.
At this point he has the audience's attention, because everyone even those who haven't ever had to deal with those queues, knows what the calls are like. And he made a point of not taking escalations or otherwise 'filtered' calls. He wanted to understand the real situation, on the ground, as an anonymous voice that the customers would have no knowledge of or reason to behave unusually with.
Many of the calls were mundane, which is no surprise; any company, even with the worst ratings, will have some reasonable level of competence or they simply won't be in business anymore, even if they started as a monopoly. But he told us that he got one call that really shaped his understanding of the situation, profoundly: a woman who called in for the fourth (I think) time, in tears, saying that she wasn't upset with him, but she needed to escalate to a manager because the situation was just that bad. The zinger on the story was, of course, "Well, ma'am, you have a manager now."
Great story, right? Only it didn't stop there, and that's the thing that mattered. He instituted a new policy, effective immediately (or at least "over the next couple of days", but not "as soon as we can", much more concrete than that): no matter who you were, or where in the company, once a customer call "touched" you, you stayed on it until it was resolved. Because the root problem he had observed was that even without folks actively "tossing it over the fence" there was so much confusion about who was responsible for what, or could do what, that it was difficult to get even simple things fixed, and literally impossible if the thing actually needed more than one department, in most cases.
He also made it clear that management understood that it would absolutely trash call times and massively increase the load, and that this was not going to be treated as a failing of the call centers; they hired more call center employees, changed the systems to be more effective at routing people to the right queue in the first place, put in messages explaining what was going on to customers so that expectations were set before the customer ever spoke to an employee, and a variety of other efforts.
The interesting thing? Within a month or two, call volume was actually down, because it was being handled so much more effectively. The company slogan was changed from "Ride the Light" (nice but fundamentally meaningless) to "Spirit of Service", and the new slogan was given much more than lip service. The company certainly still had issues and struggles, but it was a profound change, top to bottom, precisely because it was coming down from the top based on the needs at the bottom. If some middle-manager's fiefdom was causing turf wars, it got split up, without mercy. If an initiative turned out to be a bad idea, it was either cancelled or suspended and the resources redirected to something else, without it becoming a blame-backstabbing fest, just a simple acknowledgement of "well, that didn't work out, what did we learn and what can we shift to that we think will do better?"
Speaking as a customer of the company, it made a very perceptible difference in the short term, and that rapidly built upon itself as the improvements continued, month over month and year over year, and within a few years neither I nor others (at least according to the satisfaction surveys) dreaded calling for service. It might not have been the favorite activity of the day, but it was a "non-event": you got what you needed, in an efficient and pleasant interaction, if there were problems they got resolved, and you could basically trust that the company was going to treat you like they valued you as a customer.
Speaking as an employee, the difference it made was vastly more profound. As with customers, it did take some time for things to turn around, but the signals from "on high" were not only clear, they aligned with reality, and there was a real sense that while the upper management might or might not have known the every-day travails of those on the bottom run, they cared about them and were willing to invest real time and effort into learning enough about them to figure out ways of resolving them.
As I said, this isn't a blueprint, and not all of it applies directly. For example, SE's model is much closer to a "volunteer" organization, with the customers being those who just show up to ask questions or find existing answers to questions others asked, and the population who focus a great deal on answer being a different "tier" more akin to volunteers. And as with many volunteer organizations, there isn't actually a "bright line" between those two: many volunteers start as "customers", and frequently current volunteers may need to step back from that role if other demands require their attention. But the volunteers are the public "face" of any such organization, and if there is any significant or widespread discontent among them, your customers aren't going to get a good experience… nor, if you are a business with volunteers (as opposed to a purely volunteer organization) are you likely to be successful.
The lesson I take from all of this? A good story helps to sell people on a vision… and if you're in a bad situation, you're going to need one in order to convince people that you've made a clean enough break with whatever was causing the problems that they're willing to grant you any benefit of a doubt. But you must follow through on that, sooner rather than later and in "a big way", or they're simply going to decide that the story was nothing more than a pretty lie, and it will be that much harder to convince them to ever give you a third chance.
